


Cut Man Coda

by Longdaysjourney



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e02 Cut Man, Gen, Human Disaster Matt Murdock, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:40:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23341105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Longdaysjourney/pseuds/Longdaysjourney
Summary: Claire is startled awake – and is, for a moment, disoriented. She’s curled up on an unfamiliar couch, knees tucked in towards her chest and a blanket hastily thrown around her shoulders. Ghostly light from a TV, its volume turned down low, reflects off the coffee table.
Relationships: Matt Murdock & Claire Temple
Comments: 19
Kudos: 44





	Cut Man Coda

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ceterisparibus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceterisparibus/gifts).



> ...whose great fic:  
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/22920856/chapters/54787681  
> totally made me yearn for some Matt/Claire. Of course, they wrap it up in an absorbing, thoroughly engaging, angsty bow.

Claire is startled awake – and is, for a moment, disoriented. She’s curled up on an unfamiliar couch, knees tucked in towards her chest and a blanket hastily thrown around her shoulders. Ghostly light from a TV, its volume turned down low, reflects off the coffee table. 

It’s not like her to fall asleep in front of the television, and she quickly flips through her memories – it was her day off, her plans had consisted of nothing more exciting than sitting in front of Netflix with greasy takeout from that Chinese place down the street.

A metallic clatter coming from the fire escape just outside pushes her towards full awareness and with it, the tide comes rushing back to shore – the bloody, unconscious man in the dumpster, a tense interrogation on the roof, the Russian’s backward dive off the ledge, and an insistent exhortation that she flee her apartment.

The window had been left open a crack (again, unusual for Claire, who usually double and triple checks the door and all windows before drifting off to sleep) and she can see a shadow hunched over the sill on the other side. 

“Mike!” She grabs the edge of the window and yanks it up, the frame’s peeling paint flaking off in her haste. With her arms wrapped around his torso, she pulls him the rest of the way in, and he tumbles into a heap on the floor, nearly taking her out in the process. For a moment, all she can hear is the sound of his harsh panting. And is she imagining things or is there a wet undercurrent to his breathing? 

He pushes up his mask, damp with sweat, up and off his forehead. A new bruise is forming under one eye, she notes clinically, and minor lacerations cross his cheek. The wet rattle in his chest seems more pronounced now, and Claire feels a mix of frustration and worry – it had been borderline suicidal to go out again with a barely aspirated pneumothorax, cracked ribs, a concussion, and God knows what else. 

He should have been confined to bed, not facing off against… she shakes her head, cutting off that unproductive train of thought. Instead, because Claire has always been a practical girl (the only girl in high school to opt for car engine repair over home economics, the woman whose pragmatic approach made her the most sought after nurse at Metro General), she attends to the matter at hand – getting “Mike” off the floor and onto a surface where she could examine him more closely. 

She hooks his arm around her shoulders and, bearing a good amount of his weight, half leads-half drags him to the couch, depositing him unceremoniously on the cushions. He tries, and fails, to hold back a groan. “Sorry, sorry”, Claire murmurs, dropping to a crouch in front of him. 

Feeling a sense of déjà vu, Claire runs her fingers lightly over his head, feels under his hair for any new bumps. Satisfied with what she finds (or doesn’t find), she moves down, pressing her ear against his chest, where she again hears the tell-tale sign of something amiss – decreased breath sounds from his right side. “I think you might have re-collapsed your lung,” she says grimly as she starts to move towards her medical bag, which was propped against the leg of the couch, its hinges opened wide. 

He catches her wrist, his breathing already easing, “No, no, it’s minor this time. I can breathe fine.” He tries for a wan smile and mostly succeeds.

Reluctantly, she relents – earlier, his preternaturally acute hearing helped him assess whether their captive was conscious, perhaps it could serve as a CT scan as well. After what she’s witnessed today, she’s no longer sure what was possible or impossible anymore.

She only knows that the grinding fear and exhaustion she’d been feeling these last several months – as the hospital strained under the weight of more and more patients, caught in the crossfire of violent crime in the city – that feeling of being dragged down, has begun to lift, almost as soon as she cast her lot with the black-clad, masked vigilante brought bleeding to her door. 

Claire had heard the whispers of course, among her fellow nurses, among the patrons at her favorite coffee spot, and sometimes among her patients, both victims – _“They say he’s the Devil…he appeared out of nowhere…he saved me…”_ and perpetrators – _“I’m telling you, he wasn’t human, he knew exactly what I was gonna do next.”_

But the man she and Santino had lifted out of the dumpster had seemed so slight, so vulnerable, hardly a figure that’d inspire fear among Hell’s Kitchen’s criminal element.

She closes her eyes, remembering his panicked gasps as his lung collapsed; and how quiet he was after, ragged breaths becoming slow and deep as the pain and fear receded. 

He had been reticent, meeting her questions with stony silence. But perhaps he felt that he owed her something (after all she had saved his life), because he did eventually tell her, haltingly and seemingly in spite of himself, about the kidnapped boy and the human traffickers and the trap that had ensnared him. 

But despite the toll exacted in blood and flesh, the boy was still out there – alone and afraid, his fate uncertain – and so Mike had left, limping and favoring his right side, determined to bring him back.

“So, what happened?” Claire asks as she tugs up the hem of the black thermal shirt to reveal his abused side. She winces at the sight – the bruising from earlier is already darkening to an ugly purple-black and there are new bruises starting to form, a patchwork of mottled skin, hot to the touch. 

“I had the advantage of surprise – at least for a moment,” he says wryly, shifting minutely as her cool fingers probe his skin. His eyes dart away from her face, settle at a point past her shoulder. “There were a lot of them,” he finally concedes, “but I managed to get the boy out.”

“Hmm, a lot of them?” Claire asks – she’s known him for barely the space of an evening, but already she understands something about how he operates, how he minimizes, deflects. “How many exactly?”

“Maybe ten?” He pauses, reconsiders, “Twelve?” 

“I don’t know,” he admits – “I’m usually pretty good at differentiating heartbeats, but I was distracted.”

“Could be the concussion,” Claire huffs, reaching into her medical bag to retrieve a pair of gloves. “I’m going to need to redo some of these stitches. It looks like they’ve opened up a little.” 

The stab wound on his side is seeping more blood than she’d like. She blots at it with some gauze, then flushes it with saline solution before snipping the dangling threads from her earlier repair. So engrossed is she in her task, that it’s only halfway through threading his wound closed, forceps pulling on the edges of his skin and holding them together, before she notices he's gone very still and silent. Looking up, she notes his shut eyes, the faint sheen of sweat beading on his forehead. “Mike? Mike? Talk to me. Are you okay?”

A long shudder and then he opens his eyes a crack. They’re hazel, Claire realizes with a start; they reflect the exhaustion he seems so desperate to hide. “Sorry,” he shakes his head, “it’s just… it’s been a long night.”

It’s a small admission, but Claire suddenly wonders, what must a blade – slicing through skin, fat, and muscle – feel like for a man who can smell cologne from five floors away? How does the pain from a beating severe enough to precipitate a lung collapse register to someone who can hear a heartbeat from across the room?

Gently, she finishes suturing the re-opened cut, the line of stitches neat and tidy, and knots the ends. “I won’t tell you how much of an idiot you were to go after those men in your state”, she says, as she carefully tapes a bandage over the wound and pulls his shirt back down. Sitting back on her heels, she takes off her gloves, balls them up and throws them on the floor next to the couch. 

“But,” she continues, pushing him back on the cushions when he tries to prop himself up, “you need to rest now.” Her tone makes it obvious that she would entertain no objections. “Stay here, where I can keep an eye on you to make sure, you know, that you don’t die.” 

In truth, the danger’s passed, but it would still make her feel better if she could watch over him, prevent him – at least for tonight – from dashing out the window at the first inkling of trouble. “Sleep here a few hours, you clearly need it.” 

“Hell of a way to get a guy to spend the night,” he smiles, and it’s slow and easy and takes over his entire face, transforming it in an instant. 

Claire’s suddenly self-conscious, and she knows it’s ridiculous – the guy is blind after all – but now that the adrenaline has evaporated, she’s acutely aware of her flimsy camisole, the fabric semi-sheer and weightless, and of her hair, piled in a messy knot at the nape of her neck. Her face flushes, traitorous heat racing across her neck, her cheeks, and she wonders if he can sense it. She suspects that he could most certainly sense the uptick in her heartrate.

“So you’ll stay?” 

“If it’ll make you happy,” and there’s that smile again, brilliant and open. He plucks the blanket she throws at him in mid-air and his accompanying laugh follows her as she pads into the kitchen to make herself some tea.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a short one-shot, covering a missing scene between Season 1's Episodes 2 and 3, which riffs off of Matt's line to Claire before he sets off in search of the kidnapped boy: "I'm thinking if I make it through the night, I might need some help getting patched up." Totally self-indulgent and unnecessary - sorry!


End file.
